Fedora Weekly News: Work Flow

Work flow for Fedora Weekly News Writers and Editors.

Writing News Beats

Due Dates

Everybody works on News Beats all week long with due date on Wednesday 9:00 PM Eastern Time. Upon completion of the beat the beat author changes the status in the Beat Sections Table from "incomplete" to "COMPLETE". This provides an indication to the editorial team that there will be no further updates to the content unless the author notifies the editorial team.

Style and Formatting

You can help the editorial process quite a bit by remembering a few stylistic points in your writing:

FWN attempts to adhere as closely as possible to the StyleGuide. Writers should familiarize themselves with it and try to keep in mind some of these elements in your writing, such as active voice, etc.

It is preferred that citations and references in your work use the markup provided by MediaWiki's cite.php module. Wrap any URI, which you wish to cite, inline with an opening and closing ref tag and include a reference placeholder tag at the bottom of each item in your beat. For example see the markup and its resultant rendering below:

Sample showing markup and displayed output
from use of cite.php reference markup

Markup

==== Title of Some Item in Beat ====
Here is some text and it includes a reference
<ref>https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Main_Page</ref>
to the main page of the Fedora Project. It also contains another reference
<ref>http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN</ref>
to Fedora Weekly News itself.
<references/>

Output

Title of Some Item in Beat

Here is some text and it includes a reference
[1]
to the main page of the Fedora Project.
It also contains another reference
[2]
to Fedora Weekly News itself.

For references to people who are members of the Fedora Project community, it is good to insert references back to their wikiname pages. It is preferred that this is done with their User namespace, e.g.

[[User:fasname|Joe Bloggs]]

. A fallback for those who have not migrated their wikiname pages to the User namespace is to use their camel case name followed by the person's name with the first and last name separated by a space, eg.

[[JoeSmith|Joe Smith]]

.

Another consistency point is what tense the writing is in. Write in the past tense, since the News is covering events that have already happened.

If you can make your beat more narrative and summary, this will be more readable. When reporting on long exchanges or discussions amongst many people, try to write concisely, reporting on the most salient points.

FWN will soon be publishing via Fedora Insight, a Drupal-based central site for information, events, media and more on the Fedora Project drawn from across the community. In order to integrate Fedora wiki markup with Drupal, some work has been done with http://drupal.org/project/flexifilter, but there are a couple cases where you can help:

where you have bulleted URLs prefaced with some text, continue to use the

<ref> </ref>

tags

where you only have a bulleted list of URLs, do not use ref tags, but instead simply the asterisk followed by the URL.

Editorial Passes (Wednesday PM)

The editorial team starts copying the contents from beats to live issue page (with editorial pass) and a goal to have a rough draft by Wednesday evening Eastern Time.

An editorial pass should ideally consist of editing the submissions to conform to the StyleGuide, ensuring that the link references appear to be accurate and fixing up any obvious typos or grammatical errors. Other common corrections include: ensuring that there is no space between a citation in square brackets and the preceding word, making sure the wikinames of mentioned people are correct, and making sure that the list of URL references is separated with a complete newline between each reference.

Submit the News (Wednesday PM)

There are two wiki tasks to do to get the news formatted for the next issue: 1) create a new FWN issue page for the upcoming issue 2) update the redirect so that the https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/LatestIssue points to the new issue.

Creating a New Fedora Weekly News Page for the new issue

3. Edit the new page; open a second tab in your browser to FWN/Beats and copy the source from each COMPLETED beat one after another, into the page edit you have open in the other tab for the upcoming issue; be sure to preserve the section anchors to ensure correct formatting

4. Save the page after you have copied the last beat into the new page

Uploading Files for the Webcomic (or other images)

Sending New Issue Out to fedora-announce-list

Finally, the editorial team submits the weekly news as a mailshot in plaintext to announce@lists.fedoraporject.org and news@lists.fedoraproject.org before Wednesday midnight Eastern Time. This is handled by Pascal Calarco or Adam Williamson, whomever is available. If someone else needs to send this out who is not approved to post to the list, Max Spevack or another list admin can approve the message to the list.

Formatting the plaintext mailshot

Copying the printable version of the issue from the browser into an e-mail and cleaning up some of the remaining wikilinks seems to produce clean enough output for mailing. We send out the entire contents of the issue to fedora-announce-list.

Clean-up actions necessary to produce plaintext may include the following:

The "up-arrow" anchors beside each reference need to be removed. This can be done in a variety of ways. Using vim the easiest way is to do a regex substitution for the numeric reference:

s/Ctrl-v u 2191//g

.

Anything marked-up as a package will need to have the package-name tags removed

Check for HTML character entity markup

Copy issue to appropriate news outlets

A CC: of the mailshot can be sent to the following addresses:
distro@distrowatch.com
news@phoronix.com
editor@lxer.com